1. Field of the Invention
The embodiments disclosed herein relate to integrated circuit design and manufacture and, more particularly, to an integrated circuit design method that incorporates both layout and client-specific manufacturing information into a final design structure and an integrated circuit manufacturing control method and an associated system that process such a final design structure.
2. Description of the Related Art
In integrated circuit design, the term “tape-out” typically refers to the final results of the design flow, when a final design structure (i.e., an approved computer-aided design (CAD) file), which contains all of the layout information for a specific integrated circuit, is sent out (e.g., to a manufacturing facility (also referred to herein as a foundry or fabrication facility) for mask generation followed by fabrication. The term “tape-in” typically refers to receipt by one or more manufacturing facilities of the final design structure. In addition to tape-in, various stand-alone inputs are submitted to the manufacturing facility from other sources (i.e., from sources other than the integrated circuit designer or developer). These stand-alone inputs can include, but are not limited to, supplemental manufacturing requirements, requests, and other project-related inputs. Such stand-alone inputs can be received by the manufacturing facility in different formats. Additionally, when the same integrated circuit design is ported to multiple different manufacturing facilities, the stand-alone input received by each manufacturing facility may vary. As a result, problems are created for entities that want to port the same integrated circuit design to multiple manufacturing facilities with uniform results.